Brands over time

cinch
over time

Every year keeps its colour across every chart.│ ChatGPT, 30 Nov 2022

311 of cinch's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2021 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 86 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 6 other motoring brands, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
311
Years covered
2021–26
Archived before ChatGPT
86
Blog · press
147 · 164

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

cinch's homepage from 2019 to 2026, closest to 1 July, from the Internet Archive. Pick a year or press play. Each headline is quoted from its capture and links to the archived copy.

2026cinch.co.uk7 Jul 2026
cinch homepage, 7 Jul 2026

Screenshot of cinch’s homepage (cinch.co.uk) as archived by the Internet Archive on 7 Jul 2026. © cinch or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by cinch.

Homepage

2026

“£250-£1000 off over a thousand selected cars”

Page title

Buy Used Cars Without The Faff - cinch

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2019Welcome to cars without the faff.
  2. 2021The easy way to buy a car online
  3. 2026£250-£1000 off over a thousand selected cars

3 captures. Screenshots are rendered from the archive and can pull in images archived later than the page itself; dates come from the capture. Years without a capture are greyed out in the strip.

02 · Measures by year

How the writing moved

Every year’s pages, averaged. Pick a measure. Hatched bars rest on fewer than 10 pages: context, not a finding. The page count sits under each year.

Sentence lengthAverage words per sentence.
8
16
24
Motoring avg 14.3
18.0
17.7
18.0
18.6
17.8
14.4
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
2016no pages
2017no pages
2018no pages
2019no pages
2020no pages
20214 pp
2022114 pp
20239 pp
20241 pp
20252 pp
20261 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
202118.04
202217.7114
202318.09
202418.61
202517.82
202614.41

Years with pages: 2021 (4), 2022 (114), 2023 (9), 2024 (1), 2025 (2), 2026 (1). Dates come from page metadata, structured data, the URL, or the month a page was first archived (a latest possible date).

03 · Against its sector

cinch among motoring brands

Each dot is one brand’s mean across all its measured pages; the tick is the sector average. Only brands with 10 or more measured pages are shown or counted. Select a dot to open that brand.

  1. Contractions

    39% more than its sector

    22.6 against a sector average of 16.2; highest of 7.

  2. Questions

    37% less than its sector

    2.9 against a sector average of 4.6; lowest of 7.

  3. Em dashes

    19% more than its sector

    4.14 against a sector average of 3.48; 3rd highest of 7.

Sentence lengthHighest of 7
cinch 16.6
12.916.6
ContractionsHighest of 7
cinch 22.6
11.922.6
"You"Highest of 7
cinch 73%
56%73%
"We"2nd lowest of 7
cinch 24%
22%34%
QuestionsLowest of 7
cinch 2.9
2.98.0
Long words2nd lowest of 7
cinch 19%
18%26%
Em dashes3rd highest of 7
cinch 4.14
1.745.19
AI-associated wordsHighest of 7
cinch 1.81
0.381.81
Exclamations3rd lowest of 7
cinch 0.85
0.211.61
Page lengthLowest of 7
cinch 753
7535,102

Pages measured: Halfords 22 · Kwik Fit 170 · RAC 193 · cinch 311 · Arnold Clark 141 · carwow 320 · Motorway 194. Measures and method: SGR-010; this sector and its brands were added by Brands over time, measured exactly as the studies measured theirs. Sector averages and ranks cover every brand in the sector on this site.

04 · Vocabulary

Words cinch uses more than its peers

The words this brand reaches for more often than the rest of its sector. This is subject matter more than voice.

finance37.7 vs 7.4
cars145.5 vs 66.2
browse18.4 vs 0.8
understand19.3 vs 2.4
journey20.6 vs 4.3
quality23.8 vs 6.1
cinchSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 311 pages. Checked for product names and page furniture.

05 · In its own words

What it sounded like

Openings of real pages, quoted word for word, oldest first. Each links to the page, or to the Internet Archive’s copy when it has gone.

2021 · Press
“The UK car sales charts have been in chaos in the last two years – like most industries, to be fair. This is due to the global pandemic disrupting the car selling process, and a critical shortage of vital superconductor components hampering car production.”
The UK’s best selling cars in 2021
2022 · Blog
“When it comes to enjoying the summer sunshine from behind the wheel of a car, we Brits are among the most enthusiastic out there.”
Best summer cars for 2026
202510 Sep · Announcement
“The first cars that are eligible for the government’s new Electric Car Grant have been announced, and it’s an impressive list.”
ecg-full-discount-cars-announced

06 · Every page

All 314 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 311 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (2 under 150 words of text, 1 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20261 page
20252 pages
20241 page
20239 pages
2022114 pages
20214 pages
In the overall numbers, no year180 pages
Not measured3 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

cinch's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, fetched from the live site in 2026 and from the Internet Archive for 2015 to November 2022. Homepages are shown as captures; product and help pages are not measured.

The measures

Code counts from ScriptGrain’s writing instruments: sentence length and rhythm, contractions, pronouns, punctuation, long words, and three published lists of AI-associated words. No AI model reads or judges any page.

What it cannot say

These measures describe style. They cannot tell who or what wrote a page, and nothing here says or implies that any brand used AI to write.

Sample sizes

Every number carries its page count. Years under 10 pages, and before-and-after comparisons with under 10 pages on a side, are shown as context only.

Sentence length
Average words per sentence.
Sentence rhythm
How much sentence length varies (standard deviation over mean). Higher reads less even.
Contractions
Contractions (we're, you'll, it's) per 1,000 words. A rough gauge of how conversational the writing is.
"You"
Share of I/we/you pronouns that are "you": how much the writing addresses the reader.
"We"
Share of I/we/you pronouns that are "we": how much the writing talks about the organisation.
Questions
Question marks per 1,000 words.
Exclamations
Exclamation marks per 1,000 words.
Long words
Share of words with seven or more letters.
Em dashes
Em dashes per 1,000 words.
AI-associated words
Words from SGR-007's three AI-associated lists, per 1,000 words. These are style markers that people used long before ChatGPT; a higher rate says nothing about who or what wrote the page.
AI-era marketing words
Marketing words that became more common in AI-era copy (seamless, elevate, unlock...), per 1,000 words. A style measure only.
Quieter LLM-favoured words
Everyday words language models are known to over-use, per 1,000 words. A style measure only.
AI-associated sentence shapes
Sentence patterns such as "not just X, but Y", found by ScriptGrain's cliche checker, per 1,000 words. A style measure only.
Page length
Average words per page.

Studies: SGR-009: Do brands in the same sector sound the same? · SGR-010: How UK brands write · SGR-011: Did brand writing change after ChatGPT?.